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    The subtlety of Ireland’s leftward shift explained.

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    Where they vote left, young  voters tend to focus on redistribution and inequality. Only 31% of 18-24 year olds and 32% of 25-34 year olds support Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. By William Foley. Ireland is on the cusp of a general election which will see an unprecedented transformation of its political divisions. Surprisingly, it will be the first time in generations that questions of economic distribution will have affected the outcome. Evidence from opinion polls and surveys shows that where younger voters (under 29 years of age) reject the dominant right-wing parties they do so because they want greater economic equality. This gives the left a unique chance by focusing on their core issue – redistribution – to galvanise today’s youth to an egalitarian agenda  if, despite the failure of commentators to read the situation, they keep clear heads and take the opportunity. In postwar Europe, political parties in most countries traditionally competed over who got what, and how much. Parties were aligned along an axis – on the right were those who believed that the market should be the primary mechanism for determining the distribution of wealth, and on the left were those who believed that this distribution should be fixed in large part by the government.  Ireland has usually been regarded as an exception. Here, the main political division does not run between the left and the right.  Here it has not been between those who favour greater redistribution by the state and those who are against it, but between descendants of the opposing sides in the civil war. Those lineages may have some importance today – Fianna Fáil would probably not have attempted to rehabilitate the RIC – but what they amount to in practice is a system in which the vast majority of people have always voted for parties which have been economically right-wing, at least since Lemass.  This state of affairs has not prevailed because Irish people are inherently more right-wing than other Europeans. Political views are not the result of a simple transformation of broad values and social attitudes into party support; they are the indirect outcome of a process which filters those values and attitudes through a given ideological frame. These frames function like lenses, capable of magnification and diminution, distortion and concentration. Certain values may be filtered out – considered irrelevant for the determination of political preference. In Ireland, due to a conjuncture of historical reasons, left-wing ideological frames were largely absent.  Other factors were at play which determined political identities: the legacy of a brutal and traumatic civil war, the personalisation and parochialisation of politics, the hobbling of economic development under British imperialism, the passive role played by the Labour party from 1916 onwards, and so on. Questions which concerned the just distribution of resources were simply filtered out by the dominant post-civil war frame. Historically, the left has failed to pry even one finger loose from the FF/FG stranglehold. Parties such as Clann na Poblachta and The Workers’ Party occasionally sparked into life, achieving fleeting electoral success before flickering out like tealights in a children’s nursery. Because one of either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael was usually in opposition, the see-saw effect of electoral politics meant that when one became somewhat unpopular, the other could take its place in government.  But the confidence and supply arrangement that prevailed in the last Dáil has meant that, while Fianna Fáil were not in the cabinet, they were not entirely in the opposition either. The economic crisis dealt them a blow from which they have not really recovered, nor have Fine Gael truly taken their place.  The result is that the two right-wing parties are more closely associated than ever – and more unpopular. Opinion polling since the general election seems to show them combined  on about fifty percent or less. Most striking is the age gradient: only 31% of 18-24 year olds and 32% of 25-34 year olds support either Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, according to an Irish Times / Ipsos MRBI poll. If these trends hold true, then what appears to be emerging in Ireland is a more traditional “left-right” divide, characterised by competition between parties who favour more economic redistribution and those who oppose it. Survey evidence seems to support the increasing relevance of attitudes towards redistribution for determining party support. Figure 1 Support for redistribution and combined support (%) for FF / FG over time. Figure 1 makes use of Irish data from nine rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) to illustrate this dynamic. Each round of the ESS asks respondents to indicate their support for the following statement: “Government should reduce differences in income levels”.  The respondent could say that they strongly agreed, agreed, neither agreed nor disagreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed. I recoded the question so that everyone who strongly agreed or agreed was categorised as “supportive of redistribution” and everyone else was categorised as “unsupportive”, excluding those who didn’t answer the question (about 2.7% of the sample).  The ESS also asked respondents if they felt close to any party (about 36% did), and which party they felt closest to. I used this question to calculate the combined support for FF / FG over time, among those who are supportive and unsupportive of redistribution, excluding those who didn’t support any party. This relationship is shown in Figure 1. The data are weighted to reflect unequal probabilities of inclusion in the sample (though the unweighted results are the same), and the years given on the horizontal access correspond to the calendar years in which most of the Irish respondents were interviewed for each of the nine rounds of the ESS. These data probably overestimate support for Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael – at least compared to present opinion polls –  but the emerging relationship that they depict is valid.  As can be seen, preferences for redistribution matter a lot more after 2011. In the preceding years, those who are supportive and unsupportive of redistribution

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    Village editorial, September: Gemma O’Doherty 2019

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    “Racist: A person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another” – Oxford English Dictionary GEMMA O’DOHERTY has become the it girl for Irish extremism: racism, anti-Islamism, homophobia and transphobia. Village published an article in our last edition, by the editor, establishing that there was little in common between O’Doherty and the ethos of this magazine. Since then, five months ago, she has veered further rightwards and, though ideally she should be starved of publicity, it is timely to address these further changes in a comprehensive piece, for the record, albeit in a small magazine. As is well known, O’Doherty (51) worked as a teacher and then spent twenty years as a journalist for the Irish Independent, rising to become an uncontroversial Chief Features Writer and writing some investigative pieces including most famously about the death of Fr Niall Molloy. She was fired in 2015 as a “rogue reporter” after visiting the Garda Commissioner’s house without editorial permission, to ask him about penalty points. She then took a successful Unfair Dismissals Case. Though most of the Irish media ignored it, it was embarrassing for the Irish Independent as its editor had himself had penalty points cancelled in dubious circumstances. In 2016 she independently produced a documentary about the death of toddler Mary Boyle. In late 2017 and 2018 she wrote several articles for Village magazine – on Madeleine McCann; on Sophie Toscan du Plantier; on sex abuse in Donegal and in a Dublin rugby school; and she wrote about her experience before the Charleton Tribunal, with which she was not impressed. Her cover story on rugby trainer John McClean was excellent and was helpful recently in bringing about his trial on indictment for allegedly abusing boys in Terenure College. She never ventilated any sort of political view in these articles. When last year she explicitly declared her intention to run for the Presidency on an anti-corruption ticket expressing her lack of faith in Irish media, Village felt the media should give her a  hearing. There were mutterings that she was quietly anti- abortion, anti-vaccination but there was no pattern of this in her journalism and she denied it, particularly in interviews with online news service, Broadsheet.ie, which supported her Presidency bid. Beyond this there was never any suspicion of intolerance in private conversations with writers from this magazine. There was no sign of it in an interview she gave to progressive Podcast, Echochambers, in March 2018; in a Kitty Holland article in the Irish Times in 2016: ‘Mary Boyle’s disappearance and the 40-year fob-off’; or when on 16 September 2018 Roy Greenslade wrote in the Guardian: “She has built a reputation as a freelance investigative reporter…Now, in an attempt to raise the profile of her concerns about police practices and what she perceives as a lack of press freedom within Ireland, she is attempting to stand for the presidency”. There was none in a piece by a Washington-based history professor in the Journal of 26 September 2018. And none in a TEDTalk she herself gave in August 2018. As late as during her Presidential bid she was writing to Panti Bliss stating: “I have throughout my career supported the rights of minorities in Ireland including transgender communities, gay families, Travellers, Muslims and victims of state injustice I admire your talent hugely and found your speech about our repressive society inspiring”. This admiration would not last. An editorial in the October 2018 Village did not endorse O’Doherty for the Presidential election the next month. She appeared to be standing on an attractive anti-corruption and media-sceptical agenda with no right-wing component but Village editorialised that she was “damned for an undue emphasis on a number of conspiracy theories” and endorsed Michael D Higgins. She did not do well in the Presidential election – she only received one of the four requisite nominations – and was predictably snookered by the media she loathes for stating, without evidence, that journalist Veronica Guerin had been killed by “the State”. Her politics and her platform were never tested. That was a pity, from all perspectives. She just might have been taken down earlier and more directly during the campaign. It was after that election that her politics appears to have turned. Perhaps this was a reaction to the success of the nastiness of Peter Casey’s campaign which placed him second. She first toured the country with other anti-corruption activists giving talks, and earlier this year established Anti-Corruption Ireland (ACI) with online members – a “political movement” which promotes “truth, justice and integrity in public office” and which intends to field candidates at all elections though it has not yet registered as a political party. In April 2019, O’Doherty ran in the European elections as an independent, receiving 1.85% of first preferences in Dublin, finishing 12th out of 19 candidates – a respectable position in itself but not what she would have expected given her high profile and zealous support. She got in to bed with John Waters, moaning about societal change. In Irish terms this amounted to a 180-degree ideological rotation. For example while O’Doherty had been championed by the libertarian-leaning readership of online news site, Broadsheet.ie, Waters had been vilified. She also developed an affiliation with someone called Amazing Polly, a Canadian version of herself who often appears on her videos, she has a symbiotic relationship with Justin Barrett of the National Party, ‘citizen journalist’ ‘GrandTorino/Rowan Croft’ and Jim Corr of…the Corrs, she often retweets Katie Hopkins, and latterly Donald Trump. But it is her agenda that appals. She conjures a racial apocalypse on Twitter:  On July 13 she Tweeted a video of what she said was “Illegal African migrants storm[ing] the#Pantheon in Paris. Welcome to open borders Europe. It will end in war”. She cites a counter-factual – open borders – and infers something as frightening as a future war. How  is this intended to make citizens feel about immigrants? In May she tweeted

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    If we replaced demagoguery with a reflective political process we’d get equality and sustainability

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    POLITICS MATTERS. It has the potential to iron out the unfairnesses of nature and luck. We talk a lot about it. We’ve achieved a lot with it. There is an undercurrent of politics that moves irrepressibly towards respect for all – sex, sexuality, race are no longer the barriers they were recently to equal treatment. But overall it is frustrating and its returns are diminishing, particularly in terms of fairness, and the environment. This is disappointing in a world capable of great sophistication. Engineering is more effective for purpose Engineers build bridges and planes that stay where they are supposed to. They rarely make mistakes and almost always do what they are supposed to do seamlessly and flawlessly. Dangerous duds On the other hand politics brings us Trump, Putin, May, Bolsonaro, and their policies. And the visionless It would be unfair to include Varadkar in such company as he is a democrat, and sharp. However, he hardly undermines the caricature of politician self-servers who prop up the status quo. Ineptitude Sometimes it is difficult to see if politicians are useless – on some issues competing views are sustainable and you can disagree while conceding someone you disagree with at least has a point. But two topical issues yield insights into how definitively inept our politicians are: Brexit and climate change. If politicians are this bad on these issues we can see there are systemic problems. Brexit After two years of negotiations politicians in the UK have not agreed what they want from a Brexit whose complex adverse economic consequences they clearly were too ill-informed to understand. Climate change On climate change, politics has shown itself incapable of moving quickly enough to deal with what the Science and the facts have shown to be imperatives for the most important issue of our age, perhaps of all ages, one that imperils humanity. Clearly there is a range of issues where our politics abjectly fails. Political journalists It is worth emphasising that is not just politicians who sell the common good short. Globally, political journalism brings us timeservers who advance primarily the status quo and vested interests: on Brexit, on climate change, on the notable international move away from liberal democracy in several cases towards proto-Fascism. The casual regurgitators of counterfactuals. Unspoken media ‘ideologies’ Media have, mostly undeclared, biases. The New York Times is East-Coast- liberal, anti-radical and po-faced. Irish media are far from the worst though they are typically confused and incoherent. RTÉ promotes the status quo, old ideas and the reputations of the most privileged and richest. The Irish Times promotes the evolving liberalisms of the ‘South County’. The Irish Independent promotes populist conservatism and low taxes. And so on and so on. They refuse to acknowledge their ideologies, and have, and are accepted as having, no independent notion of the common good. This is no particular criticism. It is the way it is done; few are activated against it, fewer still cogently. But it doesn’t position them well to oppose the single-minded politics of the gutter that now engulfs the discourse. How to enshrine the common good: cast votes for it Politics is generally conducted in ways that are not ideologically well-defined and simple. If we are serious about eradicating the politics of the gutter – to find a definitive better way – we need to think afresh, to coalesce on some sort of a model. What if voters were allowed, or forced, to make political preferences only after suspending their material interests and their gnarled psychologies? What if everyone’s politics enshrined the common good and the public interest driven by optimisation of the potential of humanity and the planet and the facts including natural and social science? What might the conclusion be? If people were shielded from the distortions of their own material interests, capacities and psychologies they would tend to choose substantive equality, equality of position or equality of outcome. Experiments show that people cast very different votes if voting for the common good rather than voting for their own selfish interest. Democracy must factor this into its processes. Otherwise – like any experiment carried out in sub-optimal conditions – it will produce a sub-optimal result. So how are we doing? Equality We are not doing well on equality. Just 26 people own more than the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity. The figure fell from 61 in 2016 to 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. The World Inequality Report 2018, co-authored by Thomas Piketty, showed that between 1980 and 2016 the poorest 50% of humanity obtained 12 percent of global income growth. By contrast, the top 1% captured 27 percent. Certainly in 2015, the leaders of 193 governments promised to reduce inequality under Goal 10 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. However, according to a The World Economic Forum (WEF) index the gap in income between rich and poor has risen or remained stagnant in 20 of the 29 advanced economies while poverty increased in 17. Although 84% of emerging economies registered a decline in poverty, their absolute levels of inequality remain much higher. In addition, the report states, both in advanced and emerging economies, wealth is significantly more unequally distributed than income: This problem has improved little in recent years, with wealth inequality rising in 49 countries. Income inequality has increased more rapidly in North America, China, India and Russia than anywhere else. There is a notable difference between Western Europe and the United States. “While the top 1% income share was close to 10% in both regions in 1980, it rose only slightly to 12% in 2016 in Western Europe while it shot up to 20% in the United States. Meanwhile, in the United States, the bottom 50% income share decreased from more than 20% in 1980 to 13% in 2016”. There is some received wisdom but it is not universally acknowledged, still less applied: continental Europe, the report emphasised, saw income inequality moderated by educational and wage-setting

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    Neoliberalism cloaked as modernity

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    Ireland should brace for market worship dressed up as equality of opportunity and favouring those who get up early by David Langwallner and Ben Harper   Leo Varadkar consistently asserts that he does not believe in equality of outcome but in equality of opportunity. He sees himself as “right” or “either centre right or a higher class of liberal… some-body who believes in personal freedom, someone who believes in a political economy and in a free market as the best way to create wealth”. He wants to lead a party, and we infer a coun-try, for “people who get up early in the morning”. His highest-profile initiative came in late April, when as Minister for Social Protection he launched the fractious ‘Welfare Cheats Cheat Us All’ advertising and online campaign. It aims to encourage the reporting of suspected fraud to the Department of Social Protection anonymously. The image Varadkar, who was always going to win anyway, cultivated in his long tilt at the Fine Gael leadership is that of champion of equality of opportunity, liberalism… the right… those who get up early in the morning and aren’t part of the class responsible for welfare fraud. But above all Varadkar speaks the language of markets. However, the markets are a dead end. Neoliberalism is defined as “a modified form of liberalism tending to favour free-market capitalism” (Oxford). Like Scientology or some of the madder dogmas of religion, it is pseudo-science or bad science and it has been, as we shall see, comprehensively discredited. But this is too tart. Of course it has been discredited, but its hold on us grips our lives still, grips our incoming Taoiseach. So let us try and whisper in the world’s ears, and in the ears of the Taoiseach, why it is wrong and dangerous and pushing us to the edge. For a start there are better economic theories. John Maynard Keynes was in Saul Bellow’s phrase a man of “clairvoyant intelligence”. Keynes was prophetic in his great work ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ that predicted that the dire economic conditions forced on Germany after the war would lead to its economic collapse and political upheaval throughout Europe. It resonates in our times. Keynes’ ideas fuelled recovery after recovery after the mistakes which followed 1929. Recovery was needed after the market was shown in every instance to be deficient in providing macroeconomic efficiency, let alone broader societal goals. Keynes argued that aggregate demand determines the overall level of economic activity. Inadequate aggregate demand can lead to prolonged periods of high unemployment. Keynes advocated the use of fiscal and monetary policies to mitigate the adverse effects of economic recessions and depressions. Time Magazine has said of Keynes: “his radical idea that governments should spend money they don’t have may have saved capitalism”. Keynes himself was reportedly disparaging about capitalism itself: “Capitalism is the astonishing belief that the nastiest motives of the nastiest men somehow or other work for the best results in the best of all possible worlds”. The stagflation of the 1970s with the shocks to the Keynesian system generated by oil prices opened sowed dissent. Keynes fell out of fashion with the stranglehold of unionism and welfarism and the imposition of socialist dogma. It created ‘a market’ for the work of the Chicago School and trickledown economics characterised by fetishistic privatisation, deregulation and the elimination of State subsidies. In the late 1970s much of this made superficial though never profound sense. The market may have seemed like a score counter that could be tamed for human purposes. No longer. It is the recipe for inequality leading to intolerance. After the Depression which started in 2007, Keynesianism actually underpinned some of the measures implemented in some countries – notably by Barack Obama and Gordon Brown in the US and UK. This was not the case in most of the world, particularly in Germany, which has learnt, and insisted that others learn, the wrong lesson from its own hyperinflation-driven catas-trophe – or the EU, including Ireland which was an incubator for austerity. But it is Greece that was the laboratory. When the Greeks decided the ignominy was too unfair and pointless and elected a government firmly opposed to the hopeless conditions imposed upon them they were forced into an astonishing U-turn to accept further self-destructive bailout packages. Not even the IMF thinks that Greece can comply with these terms and successfully pay back its debt, especially when coupled with crippling austerity conditions. The latest figures show Greece’s debt stands at 179 percent of its gross domestic product, or about €315 bn. Naomi Klein in her bestseller ‘The Shock Doctrine’ analyses the growth and development of Neoliberalism across the world. An economic paradigm dubbed by the author ‘disaster capitalism’. Klein particularly homes in on how these crises and others are used to justify further disaster prescriptions. She quotes Hayek’s mate Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable”. This describes the Greek decade. Moreover, Neoliberalism has contributed to the world order approaching a collapse at a startling velocity. As shown by Thomas Piketty decades of inexorably widening inequality lead to economic instability and social unrest. Trump, Le Pen and Brexit are the predictable fruits. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, intolerance, antienvironmentalism and disdain for the truth are their imperatives and their currency. It isn’t hysterical to fear that the end of human civilisation is glaring us in the face while most people look away. Established parties of government in nearly all major countries have subscribed to the Neoliberal agenda and merely quibble about its implementation. A wild ballet of madness. Neoliberalism’s imprimatur for austerity has ineluctably led to social instability and fragmentation, the destruction of pension and welfare entitlements, poorer and often

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    Street women

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    It’s still a man’s world in street names, so positive discrimination is needed for living feminists

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    Illiberal liberalism

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    College campuses around the world are renowned as centres of free thinking, individuality, and acceptance of those from all walks of life. And they are; as long as you think the right way that is. In recent years, it has become more and more normalised for people to be silenced because their opinions are seen as unpopular. In the lead-up to the abortion referendum debates raged across the nation, with students being particularly vocal, perhaps because they had little internal opposition. Although most, if not all, universities have pro-life societies, their Student Unions hold a pro-choice stance. In my experience many students feel demonised by the authoritarian view of the majority and are unable to express their opinions freely for fear of vituperation from other students. The impeachment of Katie Ascough, the former UCD Student Union president in late October 2017 is a notable example of the backlash some pro-life students face. Ascough made the decision to remove information concerning access to abortion from the SU’s magazine ‘winging it’, claiming she was acting on legal advice due to the strict laws surrounding the publication of such material and information. The decision led to the reprinting of the student magazine at an estimated cost of 8,000, a figure which her antagonists claimed was far higher than any potential fine that would have been incurred from the printing of the original material. Ascough was further criticised for making a decision that was not in line with her Student Union’s pro-choice mandate, which had been formally voted in by the student body the previous November. The grounds on which Ascough were impeached were somewhat questionable, however. She did, after all, act in accordance with the law, and technically did not actively withhold the information as it was readily available from other sources. What she did do was express a hugely unpopular opinion which was met with immediate ridicule and condemnation from fellow members of the Student Union and the student body. Posters and pamphlets were spread around campus with pictures of the original copy of ‘winging it’ containing the pricing information of obtaining an abortion and information on where to obtain abortion pills online, accompanied by pictures of President Katie Ascough’s campaign manifesto. Would the reaction have been the same if she had come out with a pro-choice guide? Perhaps not. My own experience as a student in DCU has had similar if less extreme overtones. It is almost automatically assumed that you are pro-choice; it is what is expected of you from other students. Certainly, the Student Union encouraged students via social media, not only to vote Yes in the referendum but to take part in pro-choice events which were happening throughout the year and particularly coming up to the referendum itself. DCU’s Student Union is not an outlier here, as almost every student union in the country supported the pro-choice movement. I was not the only student who saw a problem with this lack of representation for pro-life students. An organisation called Students for Fair Representation, led by a small band of DCU students, petitioned for the DCU Student Union to take a neutral stance on the abortion debate, stating in a Facebook post: “College is a time when we make up our minds on important social and political issues – like the abortion issue. But why does our Students’ Union – our voice – only pick one side of such a controversial issue to represent us and invest our welfare money in?”. From my experience, the conversations being had on campus were dominated by pro-choice opinions and this was easy to see from social media. I can’t even begin to count how many of my friends on Facebook put the Yes filter on their profile pictures. It is perfectly natural for members of the Student Union to support a movement they feel strongly about, after all, they are only human. But I feel it is also important to feel supported by the Union which claims to represent the interests of all students. It is imperative, if you have been elected, to represent those who have elected you rather than your own politics. Membership of a student union is not optional. They should be slow to take stances that even political parties, membership of which is very clearly optional, see as issues of conscience. Liberalism has several guises but the one that is subversive of those who are perceived as less liberal is unattractive, especially where the zeal of the Liberals seems to be in inverse relation to the complexity of the issue. The tainted legacy of the long-intolerant Catholic Church may be that it has left us a society of intolerant liberals, most dramatically our young people. Dearbhla Gormley

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